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Effective and agile communication in leading organisational change – Reading list

Effective and agile communication in leading organisational change – Reading list

Welcome to a curated collection of inspiring and insightful reads and podcasts to help you implement effective and agile communication when leading organisational change

 

Report:

Gartner – Shaping Culture to Support Change
How culture affects behavior and performance — and how to influence it during organizational transformation

Gallagher – State of the sector report – Internal communication and employee experience 

Video:

Communications that change behaviour

Podcast:

Communicating change

 

Books:

Leading Change by John P Kotter

 

High-Impact Tools for Teams: 5 Tools to Align Team Members, Build Trust, and Get Results Fast

 

 

The Communication Book- 44 Ideas for Better Conversations Every Day

Articles:

Putting The Human First To Transform Business Success – Forbes

 

Poor Communication May Be Slowing Down Your Team- HBR

 

Coca Cola Change Management Case Study – Change Management Insight

 

Find your Voice: The Secret to Talking with Confidence in Any Situation – Caroline Goyder

April 25, 2024 Alaina Roberts
Alaina RobertsEffective and agile communication in leading organisational change – Reading list
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Maximising marketing effectiveness – Reading list

Maximising marketing effectiveness – Reading list

Welcome to a curated collection of inspiring and insightful reads and podcasts to help you maximise your marketing effectiveness.

Report:


The language of effectiveness by Kantar  – Report which tracks how the marketing effectiveness landscape has changed and explores narratives around effectiveness

Video:

Meet the marketing genius behind Steven Bartlett –  This video highlights the importance testing and iteration ideas that helped take the Diary of a CEO Podcast from 5 thousand followers to 4 million.

Podcast:

WARC – Effectiveness is as important as efficiency – In this first episode of WARC’s Marketing Truths series, Ann Marie Kerwin, Americas Editor, and Mike Menkes, SVP, Analytic Partners, discuss how organisations can measure and prove how and where their marketing works.

Book:

Design Thinking and Innovation Metrics  – Powerful Tools to Manage Creativity, OKRs, Product, and Business Success. This book shares a simple and straightforward playbook to manage and measure innovation, how to use design thinking and how leaders manage Explore and Exploit portfolios to create impact.

Articles:

There’s one true measure of marketing effectiveness: Marketing(t) – Mark Ritson discusses the importance of thinking about long term effectiveness of marketing.

From efficiency to efficacy: 2024’s B2B marketing revolution – 2024 calls for a deeper analysis of marketing initiatives, focusing on outcomes and finding the 200% better idea.

Dive into these resources to learn and feel inspired to enhance the impact of your marketing, empower your team and drive more value. Each recommendation is carefully chosen to enhance your understanding and inspire insightful discussions.

March 12, 2024 Alaina Roberts
Alaina RobertsMaximising marketing effectiveness – Reading list
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The power of Kanban boards in marketing: a project-level view

The power of Kanban boards in marketing: a project-level view

Marketing’s remit is forever expanding, requiring a blend of creativity, strategy, and effective project management. One tool that has increasingly become central to effective marketing is the Kanban board. As with any tool, the effectiveness of Kanban boards lies in how they are used and managed.  

A key tool in the application of agile marketing, Kanban boards have crossed over from many other industries due to their ease of visualising workflow, managing tasks, and fostering collaboration. Marketing, with its multiple tasks and objectives, can particularly benefit from this approach.  

However, a common question arises when everything in Marketing is connected: should we maintain a project-level Kanban board or a tactical one? 

Project-level boards vs tactical boards 

The project-level board provides a broader view of the whole project, including the diverse tasks needed to achieve a marketing campaign’s goal. It tracks the project’s progress from start to finish, showing the status of all tasks at a glance: what’s been completed, what’s in progress, and what’s yet to be started. It’s like looking at a map of a journey from a bird’s eye view.  

On the other hand, a tactical board is more focused. It manages individual or interrelated tasks that make up a project. While this micro-level view can be handy in managing the intricacies of tasks, it might not show how these tasks fit into the overall project, and it can lead to losing sight of the big picture and end up increasing the siloes rather than removing them. 

In marketing, where campaigns often involve interlinked activities (content creation, social media promotion, email campaigns, etc.), it becomes more advantageous to opt for a project-level board. This broad outlook ensures that all elements are interconnected and moving in harmony towards the campaign’s overall goal. 

Managing your Kanban board 

Regardless of the type of board you use, its efficiency boils down to proper management. Here are some tips to guide you:  

  1. Regularly update: Ensure the board is frequently updated with the status of tasks. It should be an accurate reflection of the project’s state.
  1. Prioritise tasks: Use a system (like color-coding and tagging) to signify task importance or urgency. It helps to focus the team’s efforts on what matters most.
  1. Limit WIP (Work-In-Progress): Kanban encourages completing tasks before taking on new ones. Set a WIP limit to prevent the team from being overwhelmed and to enhance productivity.
  1. Feedback and improvement: Have regular reviews and retrospectives. Use feedback from these sessions to streamline processes and improve the board’s functionality.

While tactical Kanban boards can be useful for managing detailed tasks, the interconnected nature of marketing activities makes the project-level board a more effective choice.  

Team benefits of Kanban boards 

As previously mentioned, Kanban boards contribute to maximise project management efficiency but how do we see the benefits play out within our teams?   

Accountability: Teams can prioritise tasks based on the appropriate coding system ensuring high priority tasks are not missed as well as enabling teams to have full autonomy through clear accountability and ownership of tasks. 

Simplicity: Kanban boards can be replicated, changed and adapted resulting in a simple, intuitive and swift adoption practice within teams.  

Remote collaboration: Whilst we are all still trying to adapt to new ways of working – especially across different verticals, industries and geographical locations – Kanban boards allow cross-functional teams to collaborate without missing key updates – wherever they are in the world! 

Well managed, a Kanban board can be a game-changer, promoting transparency, increasing, improving and maximising efficiency, and ultimately, driving your marketing campaign towards success. 

If you are looking to improve your ways of working to enhance your team’s agility and effectiveness, our Agile Marketing one-day training bootcamp is a good place to start.

Run by our team of accredited B2B agile marketing trainers and practitioners. Quickly empower your team to:  

  • Work smarter – make the most of your people, budget, tools and time  
  • Implement experimentation to drive continual improvement 
  • Use data & insights to inform decision making 
  • Demonstrate results and ROI at pace 
  • Pivot or persevere – easily adapt to market forces 

Contact us to find out more about our one-day Introduction to Agile Marketing bootcamp 

Resources/reading list:

January 16, 2024 Alaina Roberts ,
Alaina RobertsThe power of Kanban boards in marketing: a project-level view
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How to use content AI and remain authentic – practical guidelines

How to use content AI and remain authentic – practical guidelines

If you are someone who writes content for a living, you may have entered 2023 a little worried about your job following the launch of ChatGPT in late November 2022. There’s no denying that on first trying out the tool, it was impressive just how quickly it could write something that was clear, well-structured and seemingly accurate. But by the third or fourth go, you quickly realised that it all looked and sounded the same, and it was glaringly obvious when someone had copied and pasted straight out of it. Content writers everywhere breathed an audible sigh of relief. The robots haven’t replaced us just yet!  

However, it’s exciting to explore how we can achieve productivity gains and access these vast knowledge banks to lift our own content, striking the balance between AI and human capabilities. Here are our guidelines on how to get the best out of content AI tools while still sounding “human”, authoritative and authentic. 

Your research helper 

Use ChatGPT or other content AI to help you research your topic and develop your key points for your piece, alongside your other previous research methods. It can also be used to research clients, client prospects, the state of the industry and so on. But asking the right questions is critical and you should never accept the first response you receive. So much so that some companies are now hiring “prompt engineers” with expertise in this area. You must keep refining your prompts to get higher quality responses and reach the level of depth you require.  

Note that ChatGPT has limited knowledge of events after a certain date and nobody seems to be clear when that date is according to a recent article by ZDNet. You may need to stick with traditional research methods if it’s recent events you’re interested in. Take an agile approach to testing what research methods work best to produce an outline which is comprehensive and accurate. 

Creating personas 

Open AI has given ChatGPT a carefully chosen tone of voice which is designed to appeal to the majority and is best described as neutral and professional, i.e. a bit generic and boring. However, you can train ChatGPT to create content that reflects your organisation’s unique style, vocabulary and tone of voice.  

To do this, you need to create a training dataset which consists of a range of content examples that reflect your organisation’s tone of voice. This should include blogs, social media posts, articles and client-facing emails and cover a variety of topics. 

If you produce content for multiple organisations, you can create different ChatGPT personas for each organisation which reflect their individual writing style. Building on an agile approach, you could set up different personas for an organisation to help test different styles and see which achieves the most engagement. 

Need for speed 

Like the famous racing game series, the pressure to increase efficiency and speed impacts us all. Content AI can absolutely help you to write and produce content much faster than previously, by speeding up the phase that takes the most time — researching and planning your piece. This can allow you to focus on the tasks that require more creativity and innovation.  

Be careful though, ChatGPT isn’t perfect and can sometimes generate inaccurate information. It’s only as good as the data it’s trained on and as with all things, fact-checking and a good pinch of common sense is required. 

Overcoming writer’s block 

Sometimes getting started is the hardest thing when it comes to writing and we all suffer from writer’s block from time-to-time. Asking content AI what it thinks about a certain subject can be enough to kick-start the creative juices. Once they start flowing again, it’s time to step away from the AI.  

Run a pilot 

We always recommend taking an agile approach and running a pilot to test and learn before deciding which content AI to adopt within your organisation. This provides the opportunity to demonstrate to leadership how the tool can help improve your team’s productivity without compromising on quality. As with all AI, privacy and security should be a key consideration. Leaders need to ensure guardrails are in place for their teams to be able to test and adopt AI solutions safely. This agile approach enables you to test and learn then quickly scale where value is demonstrated. 

Human’s rule 

ChatGPT and other content AI are still powerful tools and can speed up the content writing process, but they cannot replace human creativity, intuition and empathy. It’s essential to strike a balance between AI and human capabilities to achieve the best outcomes. Any piece of content should always reflect your organisation or client’s tone of voice to ensure it remains consistent and authentic. 

Content AI can’t compete with your insider knowledge about your market and your audiences. Always remember you are the expert in your area!   

 

Get in touch to find out how Bright can help you harness agile marketing to deliver your marketing strategy in 2024.

Resources/reading list:

December 20, 2023 Alaina Roberts ,
Alaina RobertsHow to use content AI and remain authentic – practical guidelines
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Journey through time: A curated reading list for the retrospective of 2023

Journey through time: A curated reading list for the retrospective of 2023

Welcome to a curated collection of thought-provoking reads and podcasts as a retrospective of 2023. Embark on a journey through the realms of AI, agile marketing, design thinking, and growth mindset with our carefully selected recommendations.

AI Insights for content marketers

Articles:

Podcast:

Activating agile marketing

Book:

  • Agile Marketing” by Neil Perkin – Explore adaptive marketing principles and practices, offering guidelines to redesign marketing structures fit for today’s changeable environment.

Design thinking unveiled

Books:

Podcast:

Embracing a growth mindset

Books:

Podcasts:

Dive into these resources to prepare yourself for 2024. Each recommendation is carefully chosen to enhance your understanding and inspire insightful discussions.

December 13, 2023 Alaina Roberts ,
Alaina RobertsJourney through time: A curated reading list for the retrospective of 2023
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AI, RevOps and emotion! A look back at the top B2B marketing trends of 2023

AI, RevOps and emotion! A look back at the top B2B marketing trends of 2023

It’s that time of year where we all start to reflect on the trends that have had the biggest impact in 2023. At Bright we’ve spent our year reinventing marketing with our amazing clients, including injecting greater agility into how marketers work together and with other revenue generating teams to refocus on the customer. It’s been a big year for marketing transformation. Marketing is emerging stronger, leaner, more data-driven and able to be more effective and efficient at engaging audiences.   

It’s been a rollercoaster from a macroeconomic perspective and as a business founder and MD there’s been a lot to navigate personally, as well as helping clients become more adaptable and able to manage change.  

One of my highlights was being selected as a juror for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for the B2B Creative Lion. Not only was this an amazing experience but it gave me unique insights into some of the biggest trends and critical success factors in B2B. Ranging from why you need to forge an emotional connection with your audiences, to the need for investment in long-term brand building to augment your demand and performance marketing.

As well as this, we have seen the growth of AI and RevOps (my personal favourite), and marketers moving further away from a traditional funnel to a fly wheel model. Throughout all of this, an agile marketing approach is fundamental to being able to quickly test and adopt these developments by staying responsive, data-driven and collaborative. 

The importance of emotion and patience

During my time as a judge at Cannes Lions it was clear that a shift towards a more creative approach (akin to the boldness of B2C) is increasingly evident and showing results in B2B. It’s evident in successful campaigns such as Workday’s Rockstar and Disco’s Lady J [add links] B2B marketers to use emotion in their campaigns to achieve cut through and connect with their audiences.   

Research has shown that using emotion, storytelling, and humour leads to better audience engagement. Campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31% vs. 16%) with only rational content according to neurosciencemarketing.com. This is still fairly new ground for B2B marketers so using agile principles to test and measure what works and what doesn’t is key. 

The other trend I saw emerging at Cannes Lions was that patience is a virtue in B2B. From the entries we consistently saw more of a focus on long-term brand building, and a move away from over-reliance on performance marketing. According to LinkedIn’s B2B Marketing Benchmark report, 59% of B2B marketing leaders say their C-suite has increased the importance of brand building given economic conditions. Fellow B2B Creative juror Ty Heath, Director of Market Engagement at LinkedIn’s B2B Institute commented: “Brand building is the single greatest opportunity in B2B. We see that most B2B marketers are over-leveraged in lead generation, but brand building is what drives future cash flows.” 

The AI wild west

No 2023 wrap-up would be complete without mentioning the impact of generative AI. This was the year when AI really started to disrupt B2B marketing, and beyond. The areas where we have seen the biggest impact from generative AI has to be in content generation with the launch of ChatGPT back in November 2022, what a difference a year makes! Other content AI tools soon followed. Lead generation tools such as LeadIQ and Kartra are also helping to identify and generate high-quality leads for B2B marketing campaigns. 

AI in marketing offers unpreceded opportunities, with many starting to realise efficiency gains through simple use of AI apps within their existing martech. Longer term marketing leaders will need to understand which types of AI to test and invest in and how to approach it. Privacy and security related issues are a key consideration. Leaders need to set up their teams to be able to successfully test AI solutions by putting in place the guardrails for successful and safe adoption of AI. This points to an agile marketing approach and being able to test and learn then quickly scale where value is demonstrated. Marketing leaders need to be careful to safeguard and remain customer centric and authentic. Quick efficiency gains could spell disaster without proper consideration around effectiveness and the impact on engagement. There is plenty of upside in AI adoption as long as developed within a proper framework.

From funnels to fly wheels 

The move away from a funnel view of our customers to a fly wheel model continues to gain traction. In a traditional marketing funnel model, the focus is on attracting customer prospects and then converting them to purchasing customers. But marketers have realised that it’s not just about acquisition and customers can fall out of the model. Smarter marketers are recognising the full value of a customer and the need to market to clients at every stage of their lifecycle. By fostering loyalty and advocacy you can maximise the customer lifetime value.  

The flywheel model focuses on keeping existing customers engaged and turning them into repeat customers who are also willing to act as promoters for your business. The flywheel business model is more effective and should drive higher revenue because it prioritises the customer. 

The rise of RevOps 

Another big trend in B2B marketing this year has been the growth of  Revenue Operations or RevOps . Aligning your revenue generating teams – sales, marketing and customer success functions across the customer life cycle to drive growth and keep teams focused on the same metrics and KPI is quickly becoming table stakes. This cross-functional alignment clearly requires an agile approach, breaking down siloes to improve communication, collaboration and alignment to business goals.  

Agile remains key 

What’s clear is that 2023 has been one of the most exciting years for B2B marketing. All of these trends have the potential to transform how we engage with our audiences and increase marketing effectiveness. While the developments and trends in our industry are exciting, it can get overwhelming to keep up and remain innovative. An agile, growth mindset, alongside the related tools and processes enables marketing teams to respond quickly and effectively to changing customer preferences, market conditions and developments to ensure they are delivering the best results for their companies and clients.  

Get in touch to find out how Bright can help you harness agile marketing to deliver your marketing strategy in 2024.

Resources/reading list:

December 7, 2023 Zoe Merchant ,
Zoe MerchantAI, RevOps and emotion! A look back at the top B2B marketing trends of 2023
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The power of inclusive design: Crafting creative experiences for all

The power of inclusive design: Crafting creative experiences for all

When it comes to engaging with your audience, you could have the most exciting, innovative product or piece of content, but if it’s not accessible then it won’t deliver the results you’re looking for. The concept of accessibility in design has reshaped the way we create products, experiences, websites, apps, and digital platforms, requiring designers to be even more creative in our approach to consider and deliver for all audiences and ultimately leading to increasingly innovative and inclusive design.

Understanding accessibility in design

Good design can connect with people around the world and across different cultures to create equity and accessibility, helping to foster an inclusive and socially responsible community. Embracing accessibility isn’t just a trend, but a commitment to designing with empathy and foresight to have a positive impact on people’s lives. It’s important to not think of accessibility requirements as a restriction, but instead an ignition to creativity, to innovate past basic delivery and offer different design layers.

Accessibility in design is about creating products and services that can be easily accessed, understood, and used by people, regardless of their physical or cognitive abilities. It is a key component of inclusive design, which puts accommodating diverse users’ needs and preferences at the core of a project.

Where to start with inclusive design

When you begin to consider how you can apply inclusive design thinking to your projects, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are international standards that help creatives develop accessible web content. While guiding structures around design can feel limiting, these guidelines set a platform for diving deeper into the creative process and encourage an innovative approach to deliver for all, not just the majority.

These guidelines are built on four guiding principles that fit under the acronym POUR:

The Inclusive design principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust

Example infographic using inclusive design principles

Infographic using inclusive design principles

Creating an accessible design involves incorporating features and considerations that enable people with disabilities to use a product, website, or environment effectively. Here are some essential elements that make the examples below more accessible:

  • Consistent navigation and layout
  • Plain language and easy-to-understand content
  • Contrast and colour choices
  • Readable fonts and typography
  • Digestible content in sufficient time

Promoting inclusive design

So, how can we deliver content and experiences for our audiences across different platforms that are digestible for everyone without sacrificing creativity? We put together some practical tips to help promote inclusive engagement whilst also ensuring creativity.

Test alternatives for visual content

Whether you are producing for a website or another digital product, descriptive alternative text (alt text) for images and graphics allows you to get creative with your visual design, while ensuring users with visual impairments can interpret what you’re communicating. Include descriptive text for the mood, story or artistic intent behind the image, not just the practical explanation, to enhance the experience for everyone.

Business reports and data visualisation

Clear reporting and data presentations are crucial to bringing your audience on your journey and building confidence in your strategic direction. To make these documents accessible, formatting is everything. Accessible PDFs or data tables used alongside visually engaging charts and graphs will give you extra opportunities to represent your data in an effective and creative way, whilst ensuring you’re being inclusive of a broader audience.

Experiential event design

When you think of an event experience, your first considerations are sight and sound. However, by incorporating other sensory elements such as touch, smell or taste into a tactile exhibit, you allow further opportunities for your audience to engage with your brand. You’ll find your full audience benefits from this well-rounded and memorable approach to event design.

Captioning and transcripts for multimedia

Turning on subtitles is becoming more popular across different audiences for TV shows and movies regardless of ability. If your project involves multimedia content like videos or podcasts, tools such as closed captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions help ensure you will reach a wider audience. Within inclusive design, these additions don’t just make your content more accessible for users with hearing or visual impairments, but also open opportunities for creative storytelling through synchronised captions or tailored transcripts that can capture nuances in spoken content. In the same way that a script has stage directions for actors, you can create a more valuable experience for your audience with further direction on how they can interpret the content.

Inclusive design is a journey that not only aligns with our social and ethical responsibility as creatives, but also expands the potential for innovation in design. It means designing with diversity in mind from the very beginning, rather than as an afterthought.

Whether we’re working on web projects, product packaging, or experiential events, inclusive design isn’t about compromise; it’s about expanding our horizons and reimagining the creative process. By thinking inclusively about our diverse user needs and providing alternative ways for people to engage, design can play an important role in making the world a more inclusive place. We encourage you to imagine and innovate without boundaries and explore how you can supercharge your creative design for your entire audience.

Resources/reading list:

October 20, 2023 Alaina Roberts
Alaina RobertsThe power of inclusive design: Crafting creative experiences for all
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Ignite your knowledge: The ultimate AI adventure begins

Ignite your knowledge: The ultimate AI adventure begins

As the days grow shorter and the nights get cozier, there’s no better time to embark on a journey into the world of AI. To kickstart your adventure, we’ve curated a list of unmissable reads and listens that will light up your path to AI enlightenment.

For the bookworms:

Rewired – The McKinsey & Company guide to outcompeting in the age of digital and AI.

MIT study: Experimental Evidence on the Productivity Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence – Examining the productivity impact of the assistive chatbot ChatGPT.

AI-powered marketing and sales reach new heights with generative AI – McKinsey & Company discuss how AI technology, particularly generative AI is transforming the fields of marketing and sales, impacting both B2B and B2C players.

10 Ways PPC Automation and AI Can Improve Your Campaigns – A look at AI and Automation in PPC campaigns from BrightBid.

Black Mirror meets marketing: the ethical implications of AI – A look at the privacy and ethical concerns around AI from Informa Tech.

Seven ChatGPT experiments content marketers should test now – Ideas from InformaTech on how to experiment with ChatGPT to create compelling content and improve market research and analysis.

For those always on the go:

The future of search in B2B marketing– Podcast with Kate Cox, CMO at BrightBid, which examines how AI will change Search Engine Marketing for B2B customers and B2B marketing.

AI will save the world with Marc Andreessen and Martin Casado – Co-founder of a16z, dives into the world of AI, aiming to quell concerns about its impact on humanity.

Which tool to start with?

With so many AI tools out there, here are a few sites that can help you decide which tools to get started with:

There’s an AI for that: https://theresanaiforthat.com

Futurepedia: https://www.futurepedia.io

TopAI.tools: https://topai.tools

And finally here’s a site which lists all the comparison sites!

Interested in hearing more about the capabilities of AI in marketing? Check out our panel discussion “AI in marketing: Unpacking the opportunities and challenges” for more insight, as well as helpful AI resources.

Happy reading from the Bright Team.

September 21, 2023 Paul Keegan ,
Paul KeeganIgnite your knowledge: The ultimate AI adventure begins
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Developing a strategy for your website continuous improvement

Developing a strategy for your website continuous improvement

What does Continuous Improvement mean to you?

Identify, plan, execute, review. Continuous improvement is a well-known process in the world of supply chain and business operations, but its benefits in marketing activity and website management are often overlooked.

It’s a common misconception that once a website is launched, the hard work is done, and we move into the ‘set and forget’ phase. In reality ongoing maintenance and continual improvement of the site and its assets is crucial to performance and success.

The role of your website in achieving business goals

Technology updates and trends move so quickly that it’s easy to fill up your task list with changes and reworks. However, a website is often the greatest go to market tool a company has, and a comprehensive website strategy helps to give your work purpose, map a path to reach your overall goals and informs how you measure results. Here are five things to consider when building out your continuous improvement strategy for your website.

1.     Identify your current state

There are different considerations to make depending on the status of your website – have you just launched a new site? Are you aiming to drive new visitors or diversify and expand your offering? Understanding your priorities will help guide you towards your plan.

As soon as people begin visiting your site, behaviour data starts to build – what pages they’re visiting, whether they are on their phone or computer, what they like (and don’t!). This data helps you understand your current website and where potential gaps are.

Undertake a full evaluation of your current content. Having an aim to regularly update and refresh your content will ensure your website flexes and develops alongside your business. By analysing your content and identifying your strong and weak spots, your content plan will begin to develop.

2.     Map your goals and objectives

So now you know where you are, but how does this align with where you want to be? Your website is an important tool for your sales, business development, and customer engagement teams. Aligning your digital goals with your overall company vision and purpose will help you unlock the potential of your platform and ensure the work you are putting in will be delivering for the organisation in the long run.

As your website continuous improvement and content development has no real end-date, it’s easy to get disheartened and feel overwhelmed, but by outlining clear KPIs for the short, medium, and long term, you’ll be able to celebrate those successes along the way to keep energy levels up and stay focused on optimisation.

4.     Focus on your audience

There can sometimes be a gap between what your company thinks the audience wants and what your audience actually needs. To continue to build improvements into your platform, you need to think as the customer. Is it easy for your users to work out where they need to go to find the information they need? Optimise your navigation, page load times, and test different design elements and ways of using content.

5.     Create your content

Keep watch for opportunities to create fresh content and ensure you are getting the maximum value from it by implementing SEO best practices and technology updates. In the same way that a Google Bot will trawl your content and learn to adjust its own algorithms, you can keep your SEO practices up to date to stay ahead of any changes.

When in doubt, use targeted survey questions and feedback forms to get a direct line to your audience and make changes based on their feedback.

Bonus consideration: Experimentation

Experimentation is a great way to drive your continuous improvement. Improving understanding of your audiences, user design, conversion and doing it quickly. Using clear, time bound experiments to increase the effectiveness of your website. When experimenting with your website think about:

  • Your experimentation shouldn’t be about vanity metrics – it needs to focus on where you can drive the most business impact. So, places to start are:
    • Pages, sections or areas that have the highest impact
    • Starting at the end of the funnel
  • Don’t just focus on A/B testing – think about big radical ideas that drastically improve the user experience. This is where you’ll see the biggest improvements

Remember to be agile – when it comes to continuous improvement it should be about spending your time where you can drive the best possible results – for your audiences and for your business goals. Test, learn and build on your findings.

Your continuous improvement journey

While website development and maintenance is a never-ending cycle, the benefit it can bring your business is tangible. By being purposeful and consistent in your continuous improvement strategy, you’ll drive better engagement with your customers and ensure you are well positioned to adapt quickly to an ever-changing digital environment.

September 15, 2023 Sian Heaphy ,
Sian HeaphyDeveloping a strategy for your website continuous improvement
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The power of an engaged social community

The power of an engaged social community

Building connections that drive success

Social media has become a cornerstone of communication, connection, and business growth. We’ve seen its growth in e-commerce, as a search engine and its use a channel to reach target audiences.

Gone are the days when your follower count would suffice. The quality of engagement matters just as much as the quantity of followers. But an engaged community isn’t just a mere collection of likes and comments either, it’s a vibrant ecosystem where authentic connections flourish – where members actively participate, share insights and initiate conversations.

What’s the magic of an engaged social community?

Build brand loyalty and trust

An engaged community can transform passive followers into brand advocates. Not only will they support your products or services but will likely promote them willingly.

Enhancing customer support

This is something you see a lot with B2C brands as well as SaaS firms and an engaged community can serve as a real-time customer support hub.

Own content amplification

An engaged community will actively amplify content you generate, increasing reach, visibility, and brand awareness.

Driving user generated content

We know content is king, but content from your users about your products and services? Gold dust. The challenge is getting it. An engaged community makes that process a lot simpler and they’ll show genuine enthusiasm for the brand.

Fostering social engagement

Here are some of the things to think about when focusing on increasing engagement from your audiences.

Creating valuable content

Engagement starts with content that resonates with your target audience. Invest time in developing personas and understanding their buyer journey to understand their interests, pain points and preference. Use these insights to craft content that educates, entertains, or inspires to encourage interaction.

Encourage two-way conversations

Engagement is a two-way street. Responding to comments, questions and messages demonstrates you value your community’s input, drives connection and belonging.

Blend the physical and the virtual

When focusing on engagement, it’s important not to look at virtual and physical in isolation. They should work together to increase your reach, drive engagement, and foster your community. Physical events like exhibitions, roundtables, and meetups alongside interactive events like contests, polls, online Q&A sessions, and live interviews inject an element of excitement into your community. These events encourage participation and provide an opportunity for followers to actively contribute.

Showcase user generated content

Peers like to hear from their peers so promoting, sharing, and celebrating user generated content is a great way to encourage contribution.

Don’t focus just on the brand

Your company pages and profiles are a great starting point to driving engagement, but building your community shouldn’t stop there. What can you do as individuals to foster the community? What subject matter experts and industry leaders are within your business that you can use to fuel your community building activity?

Measuring the success of your activity

Good engagement can be tricky to measure. It’s not just about the number of likes, comments, shares or engagement rate. That’s only part of the equation. The other parts of the equation are who is liking and engaging, are they in your ICP? And finally what’s the impact you’re seeing of that engagement? This could be increased conversion of unknowns to knowns, improved engagement and marketing audiences, brand sentiment and even increased revenue.

The future of engagement holds exciting possibilities. Virtual and augmented reality, and AI-driven interactions promise to create even more immersive and interactive experiences. As technology evolves, engagement strategies will evolve with them, redefining the way communities connect and thrive.

An engaged social media community is more than just a digital gathering—it’s a powerful catalyst for success. As the digital and social landscape continues to evolve, nurturing an engaged community will remain a cornerstone of successful social media strategies. Continue to research, use your social media data and audience data to develop strategies that not only increase your reach, but forge meaningful connections.

August 18, 2023 Sian Heaphy ,
Sian HeaphyThe power of an engaged social community
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